Well not strictly speaking a holiday, but I’m flying to the UK this evening and after spending a few days with family I’m going to Cork in Ireland for the 22nd International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning and then spending some time in Scotland visiting Edinburgh University, Napier University, Robert Gordon University and Abertay University funded by a visiting fellowship from The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance. As a consequence of travelling this blog will be having a bit of a holiday. Please check back mid October – Kia Ora.

We keep hearing in the media how many job vacancies there are for computer scientists and how the critical shortage is restricting the growth of many companies. Every one is agreed that we need more people with computing skills. This article from code.org provides an interesting insight into this skills shortage and offers some solutions.

Amazon often seems to sell things so cheaply that we often wonder how they can possibly make on profit on that. Is it just because of the massive volume of sales. This article on the Andreessen Horowitz blog drills down into some detail precisely how Amazon’s business model actually works – it’s complicated. This article was brought to my attention by my colleague Mark Wilson.

This is a clever idea (in fact I thought of it a few years ago as well). Now with excellent WiFi and 4G connectivity there is no need for an individual robot to carry all its processing power onboard. Instead they can delegate some decisions to the cloud. Wired recently reported on a project to do just this – to build a massive robot brain in the cloud. Indeed I believe that Google’s driverless cars can also use the cloud to aid their decision making. I can’t find a link for this so would be grateful if a reader who knows a relevant URl could comment.